One of the first questions you should ask yourself when thinking about incorporating video is “Does this need to be a video?”

Keep in mind that if you’re trying to present reference information (such as emergency procedures, event dates/times), your best bet is to just lay it out in plain text. You don’t want to force people to scrub through flashy intros or extraneous graphics to find the information they’re looking for.

With that said, where possible, it’s a good idea to present information as dynamically as possible, which, traditionally speaking, means opting for the visual. For the most part, short, bite-sized video segments are helpful for fast-moving, continually updating social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and more.

But for a web page (like the Portal), you should feel free to make your videos a little bit longer than what you’d see on social media.